Corrosion: Music for Instruments, Computers and Electronics (review)

Paul Doornbusch, born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1959, produced the pieces on this CD in The Netherlands, where he was resident during the 1990s and where he had the opportunity to engage in extended and fruitful collaborations with all of the gifted musicians featured there. The five works of this collection are representative of Mr. Doornbusch's output in combining acoustic instrumental parts of challenging intricacy with either live electronic processing or prerecorded materials.

Continuity 3 (2002) for percussion and computer uses transformations both of performing technique and of the sound itself to explore relationships between continuous and discontinuous textures and structures. The use of only three metallic sound-sources does indeed create a sense of continuity and coherence, whose converse is to be found in the constantly changing electronic refractions to which the sounds are subjected. The overall effect is of an extension of the idea of resonance, so that as the metallic bodies are struck and resonate, they in turn serve to "excite" the virtual resonating body in the computer, one which is no longer tied to rigid physical objects and natural decays. Both in its adherence to a carefully selected vocabulary of sounds produced by bodies in motion and in its sense of dramatic timing, Continuity 3 seems to continue the musique concrète tradition exemplified most memorably in the work of composers like Pierre Henry, Bernard Parmegiani, and François Bayle. The fact that it is performed in real time by a percussionist and a computer running Max/MSP is a measure of how profoundly the practice of electronic music has changed as a result of the accelerating development of digital technology. At the same time, the lessons it draws from musique concrète, a music composed with magnetic tape and razor blades, is witness to the fact that the best of that music was in no way restricted by what we can now view as rudimentary and fearsomely time-consuming methods, but has, and will no doubt continue to have, many subtle and sophisticated things to tell us about the art of sound-composition. The percussionist Timothy Phillips plays with and against the distorted images of his own sounds as if engaged in the almost subliminal interactions of chamber music.

Unfortunately, the Malle Symen recorder quartet has now disbanded. This Amsterdam-based ensemble was unique in its commitment to expanding the musical and technical potential of the recorder, including explorations of microtonality, theatrical modes of presentation, combining recorders with electronics, and commissioning new works from a wide variety of composers. Mr. Doornbusch's Continuity 2 (1999) shows them at their most virtuosic, containing as it does virtually no "traditional" means of sound-production, instead disengaging from one another the various physical components of playing and using a multilayered system of notation to encode the resulting complex textures. These notational devices are derived, as the composer acknowledges, from the recorder notation developed by Luciano Berio for his solo piece Gesti. This "discontinuity" between the actions of lungs, embouchure, and fingers is complemented by a "continuity" between the instruments, in so far as the individual players (who all play bass recorders) are very rarely perceptible as such, fusing instead into a single "sound-object" which sounds as if actuated by four mouths. This "instrument" is confronted by an electronic part that combines sampled and processed concrete sounds (principally but not exclusively bass recorder sounds) with synthetic materials generated by an implementation of Iannis Xenakis's dynamic stochastic synthesis technique. The combination of the recorder ensemble's dense twitterings and keenings with this often even denser "wall of sound" is for this listener the least successful aspect of Continuity 2, which sounds sometimes as if two self-sufficient pieces are running...